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Report shows more young people struck with arthritis

ASHLEY HALL: Arthritis is a disease commonly associated with older people but its crippling symptoms are affecting children in increasing numbers.

A report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows hospital admissions for children with arthritis have tripled in the last decade.

The figures are being attributed to the availability of new treatments, which require children to be admitted to hospital for steroid injections.

Lindy Kerin reports.

LINDY KERIN: It's a painful condition that can be debilitating and while it's still considered uncommon, today's report has found the number of children suffering from arthritis is on the rise.

Nigel Harding is from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

NIGEL HARDING: In the 10 years from 2001 to 2010, the hospitalisation rates for children with juvenile arthritis have tripled. So it's gone from around 375 admissions to the hospitalisations, to around 1,300.

LINDY KERIN: The institute's report suggests the increase in hospital admission rates could be linked to a change in the way juvenile arthritis is treated.

NIGEL HARDING: Certainly since 2003 with the introduction of particular type of drugs called bDMARDS which became available, they're very powerful drugs that can actually stop the disease happening, but to be administered they have to go to hospital and it's usually a day procedure.

LINDY KERIN: The head of the Rheumatology Unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne is Dr Jane Munro.

She says the number of patients has increased and agrees the hospital admissions figures are the result of new treatments.

JANE MUNRO: In particular we've had two things that would have increased the admission rate, firstly joint injections. So that's where we put steroid medicine into the joints of children with juvenile arthritis.

The public would be used to seeing this in footy players or other people who have sporting injuries. They have different types of steroid injections. We use a particular medicine that's particularly good for children with arthritis and mostly we try and do that under different forms of sedation and pain relief like laughing gas like nitrous oxide, or under general anaesthetic.

And so I think most of the admissions will be from day stay patients, rather than prolonged stays in hospital for children with arthritis. We've tried to move away from that in the last 10 years.

LINDY KERIN: And what do you think is driving the increase in the incidence of juvenile arthritis?

JANE MUNRO: That's one of the big questions that doctors and nurses and researchers are working on around Australia so not just children with arthritis but other autoimmune conditions like diabetes and Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis.

We're trying to work out why autoimmune conditions are increasing and is it due to genetics and the environment, the modern environment and we've actually got some studies at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and Monash Children's and the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne working on that at the moment which is really exciting.

LINDY KERIN: Today's report has also highlighted that more girls suffer from juvenile arthritis than boys with the hospital admission rate for females more than double that of males.

Dr Munro says the higher incidence among girls is just another part of the puzzle.

JANE MUNRO: For most of the conditions we look after, there's several different types of juvenile arthritis. Almost all of them are more common in girls and that's reflective of autoimmune diseases in general.

So the other types of conditions we look after in rheumatology are lupus is eight to one, so systemic lupus erythematosus, SLE is eight to one females to males and that's what we'll find across a lot of the autoimmune conditions and there's a lot of study to try and work out why is that happening, what is different about girls that they are more prone to this and we don't know the answer completely.

ASHLEY HALL: Dr Jane Munro from the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne speaking to Lindy Kerin.

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